Reclaim the Fire in Your Belly

After she had her second child, Emma Sepp?l?, Ph.D. developed heart palpitations. A friend offered her a piece of advice she has embraced ever since, "Your heart will heal when you turn your love towards yourself. Take care of yourself as you do your infant baby."

Emma wrote The Happiness Track, which has been translated into dozens of languages. A decade ago, in the midst of that book's success and her dual academic appointments at Yale and Stanford, she admits, "Physically, I was withering. My health was at an all-time low, and I had to spend most of my time resting. My heart broke daily because I was not able to take care of my toddler and newborn. Although I was sustained by the practices and principles I described in The Happiness Track, I was still missing something key. And that was sovereignty."

Sovereignty is reclaiming your right to exist as you, from others but also from yourself. As Emma says, "When you are sovereign, you show up with all your gifts, and you become a gift."

Last month, I read an advance copy of Emma's second book, which came out yesterday. It's called (you guessed it) SOVEREIGN. To be more specific, I devoured the book in 24 hours. It's stunningly insightful and remarkably vulnerable. The book comes across to me as a courageous act of telling the truth, even when it stretches the boundaries of what people are ready to hear.

Emma applies the concept of sovereignty in six realms: self, emotions, mind, relationships, intuition and body. I especially valued her chapter on intuition, in which she says, "We're trained to rely on outside sources of information, not internal ones... we depend, trust, and rely exclusively on information coming from outside us, shutting down a valuable additional resource: our inner knowings."

From there, Emma goes significantly beyond where most mainstream books stop when examining intuition. To her credit, I suspect this brings the reader closer to the ways in which intuition really works: as a talent we all possess but mostly underutilize.

SOVEREIGN: Reclaim Your Freedom, Energy, and Power in a Time of Distraction, Uncertainty, and Chaos is a wonderful, highly readable and completely empowering book. I highly recommend it.

Let me close with the first bit of a poem Emma uses to end the book itself:

You are so much more powerful

Than you think,

Than you know,

Than you ever dreamed.

But confined inside a box of limited

Identities

Fears

Rules and regulations

Shoulds and should nots

Beliefs

You have made yourself small.

Remember your majesty she says. I couldn't agree more.

**

Bruce Kasanoff is a ghostwriter for leading entrepreneurs .